


Two Sunrises

by Cockaigne



Category: Space Exploration RPF
Genre: Fear of Death, Gen, Mars, Space Flight
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2016-06-23
Updated: 2016-06-23
Packaged: 2018-07-16 21:54:12
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 657
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/7286107
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Cockaigne/pseuds/Cockaigne
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>In 1963, Valentina Tereshkova is nearly lost in space. Sixty years later, she goes back.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Two Sunrises

**Author's Note:**

  * For [ExtraPenguin](https://archiveofourown.org/users/ExtraPenguin/gifts).



Dawn over the edge of planet Earth. Valentina Tereshkova is too sick to appreciate it. Nausea rides her; the razor of sunlight slicing the ocean burns into her retinas. The certainty solidifies that this is a one-way trip. They won't be able to save her. If they could make a mistake so simple, so fundamental – _no descent program, you blockheads? How do I get back? Do you expect me to jump?_ – (or perhaps it was no mistake?), can they have the wit to correct it?

She listens to the voices muttering in her ear again. Space ought to be silent, but it isn't. Not in here. Ground control is her familiar, Vostok 6 is her orchestra: the creaks, the rustles, the vibration so deep in her bones it's as if she's made of sound herself. Loudest of all, her own breath. Loud but unbelievable. How is she living? How much longer can she live?

She is whirling around and around the Earth. If they don't transmit the descent program in the next hour, the capsule will stray from a safe course and she will be hurtled into the unknown. She will be the first human to leave Earth and not come back. At the thought, _unknown_ , at the image, sudden and lonely, of her curious metal coffin soaring into bottomlessness, pioneering the universe, claiming it as a place for humans to die – 

She looks for the first time beyond the edge of the Earth. There are the stars. They go on forever. She tries to look deeper, deeper, looking with her imagination beyond what the eye can resolve. The stars have no end. And almost she wants the engineers scuttling far below her to fail. A wild joy seizes her. She has spent her life leaping from planes into nothing, letting the force of the wind flex its power around her. Before her now is a true nothing, and forces of nature unplumbed, ready to take her.

Let me not return. Let me go on forever.

***

Dawn over the red edge of the crater. Her first sunrise on Mars. Valentina Tereshkova has already been awake for an hour. How can she sleep, now that the decision is made? Her time is rationed. She has calculated how long food, water, oxygen, power will last. It's not a long while compared to the years of her life, but it seems long. Impossible that someone could survive nearly a year here, cut off from the living mass of humanity. It's a place she has come to die.

She clambers into the rover and revs it up for the first expedition. This is no Vostok 6: it's quiet, the engine emitting barely a hum, the cabin insulated so that the crunch of soft wheels on rock and dust is felt more than heard. She has a toothbrush this time. They sent a return program with her as well, of course. She destroyed it. Deactivated, overriden. There must have been consternation about that. Anger, maybe? Grandstanding Tereshkova! Has she gone mad? 

She points the nose of the rover crossways into the dawn, tacking against the light. The wild joy seizes her. A one-way trip to Mars, she offered them. She is old now, she has no need to return. It would be inhumane, they'd argued; bad publicity. She's too old to care about publicity. If she saves nothing for the return journey, she will have almost a year to explore Mars, far longer than anyone could have hoped.

She may not have been the first person in space or the first to set foot on another planet. But she will be the first to die on one. It is, she would argue, her birthright. Deathright. And it is past time. She's ready to be taken by those forces of nature, the unknown profounder and more remote even than the depths of space. 

Let me not return. Let me not go on forever.


End file.
